Building a hollow chest

I wanted to share with you today a few of the idea I shared at national congress last week. The video below is a quick glance at how I start developing a hollow or rounded chest.

I few things to watch for. The demos in this video are by no means perfect. One of the things I talked a lot about during my presentation is head position. You’ll see at some points in this video the gymnasts head is ducked, because our head is heavy it pulls the shoulder blades apart and often gives a what I call a “falsely round” look. So one thing to make sure is that when gymnasts are doing these drills that their eyes stay on their hands. That will ensure that when they start doing things like pirouettes they won’t have to throw their head out to see the bar.

The other thing is you’ll see the gymnast doing slide ups in this video starting at 18 seconds. I’ve started doing a lot more of these and a lot less hollow holds. What I’ve been finding is that often gymnasts will struggle with a true hollow hold and resort to holding something of a pike shape on their bottom – so to mitigate that I try to get them to do 15 perfect slide ups where they hold each for 3 seconds before I let them move on to hollow holds. There is a full 45 minute lecture (including all the videos and the accompanying powerpoint that you can get HERE – if you want more like this video, and a more in depth explanation).

Get the full 45 minute lecture on Bars Shaping from Pre-Team Up – including all the videos and the accompanying powerpoint HERE.

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Zari Goldmann

I believe coaches should never stop learning. There are always better ways of teaching, better communication styles and better drills. My goal is to provide the best training and services there are to coaches who want to take themselves and their gymnasts to the next level.